Today, more and more television broadcasters are moving from analog broadcasting systems to digital broadcasting systems. Various standards are present for digital video broadcasting, where signals may be received by a selected one of various sources such as cable, satellite, and terrestrial. One available set of standards is referred to as the digital video broadcasting (DVB) standards.
For terrestrial DVB communications, a channel is broadcast as a data stream having a series of data frames. To allow a receiver to lock onto a desired channel, a synchronization process is performed to enable a demodulator of the receiver to lock onto the signal stream.
Currently, this synchronization process is complicated and time consuming. This is so, as preamble symbols of a data frame must first be decoded to obtain information needed for further steps in the synchronization process. However, even when some of the preamble information can be obtained and decoded from a first frame, additional information such as knowledge of an operative guard interval is not known. Furthermore, an understanding of a pattern of pilot carriers included in the data stream is also not known. Without this information, it becomes difficult or impossible to finalize synchronization for multiple data frames. Also in DVB-T2 systems, the delay for decoding a first preamble symbol makes it also impossible to decode following symbols (additional preamble P2 or data symbols) on the fly. This processing thus delays the end of the synchronization process, requiring additional time before valid channel information can be obtained.